1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to chemical detectors and more particularly relates to gas chromatography sensors.
2. Description of the Related Art
Gas chromatography (GC) is useful in the chemical industry as a separation mechanism and as a sensing mechanism. GC sensors are extremely useful for detecting specific chemicals in a gas with mixed components, but they suffer from the major drawback that they are quite expensive.
The required purities in GC mandate, within most of the current art, the use of valves that cost in the thousands of dollars per valve. One concept has been introduced which allows air pressure to perform some of the gas switching, which allows the expensive valves to be replaced with cheaper solenoid valves, see U.S. Pat. No. 4,970,905. However, the present art for accomplishing this requires complicated machining and assembly causing manufacturing expense and reliability problems.
Another limitation of the present art is that manufacture of GC columns is a tedious and expensive process. For example, the GC column must be heated uniformly while in use, and low cost methods to effectively accomplish this uniform heating are lacking in the present art. One current method to provide effective and affordable heating is to co-axially winding a heating element around the GC column—this method is expensive to implement. There are temperature control methods which are easy to manufacture, but which tend to leave the GC column directly exposed to a heating element and thus allow for non-uniform temperature spikes at places along the GC column.
Another limitation of current GC sensor technology is that the sensors need to be periodically calibrated against an internal standard, and no cheap methods exist to provide for this. The current technology is to provide a chemical, which must be stored, and an injection mechanism which must inject the chemical into the system without interfering with seals and the normal operation of the GC sensor.
GC sensors typically use a preconcentration mechanism, which multiplies the concentration of chemicals of interest in a sample and allows detection of lower initial concentrations than otherwise allowable. Typically, an absorption-desorption material is added into the sample stream to accomplish this. Current methods of adding adsorption-desorption materials tend to cause variable pressure drop in the sensor flow paths.
In the current art, the GC sensor must operate at a design operational temperature. Lower temperatures are desirable for better separation of elution times of different components, while higher temperatures improve the sensor response time. However, the test temperature must be at least as high as the ambient temperature. Typically, an operating temperature is selected that is higher than any predicted ambient temperature when the GC sensor is manufactured. This causes the temperature to be set higher than necessary when the actual ambient temperature is low, making chemical detection more difficult than required, and inducing greater energy loss to heat the GC sensor than would otherwise be required. Many GC sensors operate in a remote environment where there is no access to external power and therefore must operate from a battery or other internal power source. Some GC sensors operate in conditions where external power may be unavailable due to the detection environment—for example when detecting chemicals in the event of a disaster or in a volatile environment where power sources may be disabled. Therefore, the power consumption of the GC sensor may be at a premium in many applications.
In GC sensors that detect a wide range of chemicals, the chemicals can have widely variable elution times from the GC column. Further, the shape of the detection peaks for chemicals with different elution times will vary. As a general principle, later eluting chemicals will have a lower and wider peak than early eluting chemicals. Further, in high resolution GC sensors that are detecting concentrations in the parts-per-million (ppm) and parts-per-billion (ppb) ranges, extraneous peaks and noise will occur in the basic signal. This variability in peak shape makes it difficult for detection algorithms to correlate the concentrations of the various chemicals.
A GC sensor will typically have a long GC column placed into a small area, and will typically be wound up as tight as possible. Further, the GC column may be manufactured in one time and location, and transported and/or stored for a period before assembly of the GC sensor. A cheap method to build uniform GC columns, and to protect the columns from the introduction of impurities between the time of manufacture and the time of assembly is desirable.
A dual hyphenated GC sensor, and any GC sensor that is either utilized to detect many chemicals simultaneously, or utilized to detect chemicals from a complex mixture of gases, suffers in the current art from difficulty in finding chemical elution peaks within a complex signal. Often a significant amount of noise is produced in the signal. The standard Fourier analysis of GC signals suffer from producing ringing in the signal, especially with high frequency components of the signal. Noise suppression wavelets are known in the art, but any particular noise suppression wavelet will still tend to leave some noise peaks in the signal and complex signals continue to be difficult to interpret.
Proper sealing of GC sensors is a known difficulty in the art, and is especially problematic in sensors attempting to detect chemicals at the low parts-per-million (ppm), or even into the parts-per-billion (ppb) range. The internal flowpaths of the sensor must be protected from leakage to the ambient environment, and the analytical flowpaths containing the chemical sample must be further protected from un-designed fluid migration within the sensor.
From the foregoing discussion, it should be apparent that a need exists for an apparatus, system, and method that detects a broad spectrum of chemicals in a GC sensor in an inexpensive and effective manner. Beneficially, such an apparatus, system, and method would allow the use of inexpensive solenoid valves, provide for easy manufacture, provide for uniform and inexpensive heating of sensing elements, allow for a low cost implementation of an internal chemical standard, provide for manufacture of a preconcentration system that is inexpensive and provides uniform pressure drop, allows low energy operation in a wide range of ambient environments, that robustly detects chemicals that have widely varying elution times, and that is protected from leakage from the ambient environment and internally within the analytical flowpaths.